The Relationship Between Dictionary Look-up Frequency and Corpus Frequency Revisited
A Log-File Analysis of a Decade of User Interaction with a Swahili-English Dictionary
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21185339 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Gilles-Maurice De Schryver (0000-0001-7272-9878, Ghent University), Sascha Wolfer (0000-0002-8893-8153, Leibniz Institute for the German Language), Robert Lew (0000-0002-6772-210X, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 19 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 1-27 |
| Publication date | 2019-11-27 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | GEMA Online Journal of Language Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1675-8021 • E-ISSN: 2550-2131 |
| Publisher | Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM Press) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.17576/gema-2019-1904-01 |
| OpenAlex | W2990316092 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 3 |
In an earlier publication it was claimed that there is no useful relationship between Swahili-English dictionary look-up frequencies and the occurrence frequencies for the same wordforms in Swahili-English corpora, at least not beyond the top few thousand wordforms. This result was challenged using data for German by a different team of researchers using an improved methodology. In the present article the original Swahili-English data is revisited, using ten years’ worth of it rather than just two, and using the improved methodology. We conclude that there is indeed a positive relationship. In addition, we show that online dictionary look-up behaviour is remarkably similar across languages, even when, as in our case, one is dealing with languages from very dissimilar language families. Furthermore, online dictionaries turn out to have minimum look-up success rates, below which they simply cannot go. These minima are language-sensitive and vary depending on the regularity of the searched-for entries, but are otherwise constant no matter the size of randomly sampled dictionaries. Corpus-informed sampling always improves on any random method. Lastly, from the point of view of the graphical user interface, we argue that the average user of an online bilingual dictionary is better served with a single search box, rather than separate search boxes for each dictionary side
English language · German · Linguistics · Machine-readable dictionary · Natural language processing · Swahili · Computer Science · Lexicography and Language Studies · Mathematics · Natural Language Processing Techniques · Second Language Acquisition and Learning · Artificial Intelligence
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2024 - 2024 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |